How Much Detail Should Writers Use?

How much detail should writers use? It’s a question I deal with every single day in my work as a memoir coach, and one I strive to answer with vivid examples each time it comes up. After all, I cannot reply to a writer asking this question something as specific as, “Eighty-five percent,” or “half your words.” I cannot say, “Every other sentence should include a detail,”  or “use lots of adjectives.” These are simply not replies you’ll get from me since there is no numerical or percentage points to bring to this conversation.

How to Color Your Writing With Descriptions

When it comes down to how much detail a writer should use, what works best is to consider the color wheel.

By definition, the color wheel is an illustration of the relationship between primary, secondary and tertiary colors. As you no doubt remember, the primary colors are red, yellow and blue. What defines them as primary is the inability to get them by mixing other colors. The secondary colors – green, orange and purple – are created by mixing two primary colors. After that, those tertiaries appear before our eyes as we mix primaries with secondaries.

The color wheel lets us visualize what happens when we mix colors with one another. And, if there is a better example of how to add detail in your writing I cannot think of it. As you know from any home painting project, the key to mixing color is to do it slowly, the adage being that you can add but you can never take away, particularly if the medium you are using is paint. Add a drop of red to yellow and you’ll instantly get orange. Depending on how much red you add determines the strength and depth of that orange.

How Many Vivid Scenes To Put in a Book?

So, let’s say you are writing a memoir that includes scenes of your own rage. Maybe you’ve had anger issues owing to a childhood that was deeply uneven and wildly unfair, and you’ve brought into adulthood the inability to temper that rage. Perhaps it blew apart your first marriage and your only chance at parenthood. Essential to your success as a writer is knowing how many scenes of that rage the reader needs to see. Is one enough? Three too many? Similarly, with memoir of alcoholism or sexual, mental or physical abuse, how many scenes of the actual behavior do we need before we fully understand the relationship you are in?

The question of how much detail should writers use also exists in happy-go-lucky memoir. I mean, how much happiness can we read, after all? Eighty-five percent of the book? Two-thirds? Is one scene enough?

We were focusing on the topic of detail in writing in a live class recently when the color wheel idea popped into my head.

“One drop of red instantly changes the color,” I heard myself say, to which the writer agreed. And we went on like this, through two drops and three when I could feel that something more bracing was in order. Hers was a raw and rough topic and the paint thing just wasn’t the kind of metaphor that addressed the serious nature of her story. And it is then that I thought of blood.

And I warn you that the next sentence is somewhat scatological and altogether deliberate, and that you might not like it. But you will learn from it.

“How about blood?” I offered. Dead silence. “I remember a doctor saying to me once that it ‘only takes ‘a single drop of blood in a toilet to get someone’s attention.’”

And the writer and I connected, now sharing a value of how much detail writers should use.

A little blood changes everything. You know that’s true. And it’s a good rule for writing, though I won’t be needlepointing it on anything any time soon. Instead, I’ll just tell you and see what you do with it.

How Much Detail Should Writers Use?

How much detail do we need? Every single scene must move forward your argument. No two scenes can mean or say the same thing and in a good, long life – or even in a day or two – while the room, furniture or background might change, the action may not.  So you must choose your details carefully. We need enough detail to see that this scene changes things. If the scene does not do so, it is not doing its job. I don’t need eighteen scenes of your errant spouse’s drunken ranting. I need perhaps two. Or three, but only that third scene if it perfectly depicts that one night you were changed enough to respond and do something about that behavior. Like leave.

You can tell me that the behavior went on for eighteen years in one sentence. But show me the wedding night when he was out of control, the yearly Thanksgiving with his aiding-and-abetting, hard-drinking kin; give me one sentence that tells me this all went on for 18 years while showing us the tough work you did to grow away from needing to be married to someone who behaved just like your own father before him, and then give us the scene when you say that enough is enough. In other words, move from yellow to red to blue — warning to danger to cool. And do so quickly.

How to Perform a Rewrite Around Those Details

Much of this work is best done after you have a first draft. But if you know about the color wheel, that first draft will be less of a repetitive document and more something that moves along with the action of the tale.

If you are working with a first draft, here’s how to do it. It’s called indexing, and requires a legal pad, a pencil, and your raw copy. Start reading from the first page and in the margin, next to each paragraph, write in that margin what that paragraph does. Simultaneously, make that action list of the motion of your book on that legal pad. Maybe the paragraph introduces the bad behavior to the reader for the first time. In the margin you might write, “first drunken spree.” Write the same thing on that legal pad and follow it with your corresponding indexes, all in one, long list.

Now the question becomes how much detail should writers use when rewriting. Look at that list and begin to witness how quickly – or slowly – your motion goes from the red-hot heat of living under someone’s abusive hand to the cool blue of you and your kids on your own in some safe place. Then, as you rewrite, remember that color wheel and how only a few drops of red are needed to get us from the warning yellow moments of life to the heat of a life-changing incident to when you make the choice to bring everyone to a new definition of home.

Color your world and you will color ours.

One of the  best ways to draw attention to the book you’re writing or the website you run is to publish an Op-ed. Two of my four published books came from shorter, published pieces in which I tested my material on the public. Learn how in my class, How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary.

Photo credit: williamcromar on Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-SA